Deep inside the Cerrejón Coal Mine in northern Columbia lay a sleeping giant for 60 million years. 

That is, until it was uncovered in 2006 by Edwin Cadena , a young Smithsonian employee.

One of the dinosaurs’ successors, alongside giant reptiles with names like Titanoboa , lay Carbonemys , a turtle the size of a Smart car.    

Bound by the new-species code of silence prior to publishing this month, Cadena , now a PhD student in marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, can finally talk about his discovery and the 50 million year gap in South American history it helps bridge.

Cadena fell in love with paleontology growing up in a popular Columbian fossil town. His passion for turtles began in 2004 after finding a 140 million year old “beautiful turtle” and becoming intrigued by the information gap on South American tropical turtles.

“So that was kind of like, oh my God, this is kind of like a neat field, to do things that no one else has done before,” Cadena said.

One of the big reasons for that information gap is scientists have avoided the tropics because the dense vegetation is not very conducive to digging for fossils.

But under that vegetation often lies one of today’s most popular energy resources: coal.

“The mines are the best place to go because they are always opening new rock, new layers of rock every day,” Cadena said.

And that is what Cadena did as a Smithsonian employee out of college. Cadena found a rich supply of fossils in the Cerrejón  coal mine, many from the Palaeocene period, just after the dinosaurs.

“For the first time we are showing those fossils to the world,” Cadena said.

Among those fossils found was the massive turtle, Carbonemys .

Its skull is the size of a football and the shell is just under six feet long (taller than Cadena ). But add the tail and the head and you reach Smart car size. 

According to Daniel Ksepka , researcher in marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, the omnivorous creature is a relative of the side-necked turtles (bends neck into shell instead of retracting it like local box turtles) of the Southern Hemisphere.

It may have even eaten small crocodiles, according to Cadena , because of the strength of its mouth bones.

“When you grow so fast and you grow so big, you need to have that diet that is basically rich in protein,” he said.

That being said, it wasn’t necessarily a ferocious predator.

“It’s not going to be that different than something like a snapping turtle,” Ksepka , also a paleontologist with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, said. “It’s more of a kind of sit and wait predator.”

But the true value of Carbonemys and his coal-mine companions is the insight they give to 50 million years of South American tropics.

“Before the Cerrejón fossils, we didn’t know anything about what kind of animals and plants lived in the tropics of South America just after the extinction of dinosaurs,” Cadena said.

Carbonemys is especially noteworthy.

“One of the really interesting things about this turtle is that it is really, really large really, really early,” Ksepka said.

The next and largest known giant turtle species, Stupendemys , existed 7 million years ago.

“If [they are related], this indicates that large size in this group of turtles was reached for first time 60 million years ago, and that it probably persisted until the extinction of Stupendemys in the last 5 million years,” Cadena said.

Getting the word out was a long time coming. Between transporting and preparing the large fossil at the University of Florida, and extensive analysis and research at N.C. State and abroad, six years quickly passed.

“I went to different museums around the world trying to make sure that this thing is new,” Cadena said.

Cadena said discovering fossils has always been an amazing experience and this one is special.

“To discover something [no one in the world has seen before] and to be able to contribute [to] the understanding of the evolution of life and biodiversity on Earth, doesn’t have price for me.”